[sparkscoffee] Re: May Day! May Day! Without Profits, Communism Is Doomed
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- Date: Fri, 2 May 2014 23:09:55 -0400 (EDT)
Gloom and doom socialisim and captalisim
-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Ristad <ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: sparkscoffee <sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Fri, May 2, 2014 11:08 am
Subject: [sparkscoffee] May Day! May Day! Without Profits, Communism Is Doomed
By Gary North
GaryNorth.com
May 2, 2014
Lawrence & Wishart, a profit-seeking leftist publisher of the collected works
of Marx and Engels, is threatening legal action against Marxists.org, a website
run by a remnant of the last remaining English-speaking Marxists.
Marxists.org posts English-language translations of the works of Marx, Engels,
Lenin and other bourgeois members of the Inevitable Wave of the Future. These
are free. That’s the problem. Lawrence & Wishart find it hard to compete
against “free.”
Half a century ago, when I was writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I used at
least one of the books published by Lawrence & Wishart. Most of the time, I
used Progress Publishers editions. Progress Publishers, International
Publishers, and Lawrence & Wishart got their translations from the Soviet
Union, which subsidized the publication of books by Marx and Engels. This was a
Marxist slave society’s efforts to keep the tiny world of Communist publishing
alive in capitalist nations. I mean, how else were a tiny band of
English-speaking Communists expected to make a decent living without relying on
the Gulag archipelago to help them keep the flame burning in the West?
As a scholar, I had mixed feelings about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It
was nice to see Lenin’s legacy goes the way of all flesh. But without the
secret police to keep the faith alive in the USSR, the translation subsidies
would cease. That was why the Marx-Engels Collected Works isn’t complete. The
Communist revolution went belly-up too early. The Communists should at least
have had the courtesy to wait to shut down the whole experiment until after the
Collected Works were complete. Sure, a hundred million people died — maybe 130
million, depending on the accuracy of Mao’s records — in the experiment, but
there weren’t that many volumes left to translate, were there? (Yes, as it
turned out: at least 70.) They should have hung on a little longer. They owed
it to the academic world.
So, Marxists.org posted some of Lawrence & Wishart’s USSR-funded translations
online for free. Free! I mean, what kind of anti-capitalism is that?
Anti-capitalism requires profits to persevere. Anyone who thinks that the
proletarian revolution will come, despite some minor setbacks since 1991, is in
a retirement home. His walker and his catheter are in good working order, but
his eyes aren’t what they used to be. So, with the prospects of Communist
growing dim, the publishers of Soviet-subsidized translations figured that they
would have to make the copyright system work for them.
Lawrence & Wishart has found a way. It is going to license its material to an
outfit that will digitize it and sell it to tax-funded university libraries.
Why do libraries need to buy this, when it’s already digitized and online?
Because it will soon be taken down. Why? Because libraries are supposedly
willing to pay for it.
-RR
....
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